The best way to stop our children damaging themselves with skunk and Ecstasy
is to remove the need for them to deal with criminals – and to talk
honestly with them

'Ease drug penalties on the young,” a government adviser has urged. And of course, Professor Les Iversen, chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, is absolutely right. After all, if every young man who had dabbled with drugs had felt the fullest penalty of the law, then David Cameron would not be prime minister nor Barack Obama US president.

But in my view, Les Iversen doesn’t go nearly far enough. He talks of police being granted the discretion as to whether to press for civil rather than criminal penalties in certain drugs cases. This, however, is a fudge that doesn’t address the real issue. If our drugs laws are antiquated, expensive, inconsistent, socially damaging, draconian and counterproductive – and they are – then the solution is not to give the police more leeway to turn a blind eye. The solution is to change the laws.

This is something I feel especially strongly about since I have two children fast approaching the age where they might be tempted to dabble with proscribed substances. The thought of my ex-darling-sweet-babies hanging out in the corners of seedy dives “waiting for the man” and either being ripped off or ending up off their faces fills me with horror.

Which might sound a touch hypocritical from someone who a couple of decades ago was doing exactly the same things himself. But having lived it, I’m probably in a better position than more straight parents to understand why kids take drugs, why it’s probably a mistake to punish them for it, and why it’s so important that if they’re going to experiment in this way they should be able to do so as safely as possible.

What’s the thing I’m scared of most about my children and drugs? Not the drugs themselves, that’s for sure. The way we class drugs bears almost no relation to their relative degrees of harmfulness, as Professor David Nutt, the former government drugs adviser and Cambridge-educated neuropsychopharmacologist, made himself extremely unpopular by explaining. Alcohol and tobacco, Nutt infamously pointed out, are more dangerous than LSD; Ecstasy is safer than horse riding.

No, what worries me far more about my kids and drugs is the grubby illegality of that culture: the fact that whoever supplies them will, by definition, come from the criminal underworld; the fact that, there being no consumer protection or quality control, their drugs could be cut with any quantity of rubbish; the fact that they risk being imprisoned and having their futures blighted for the essentially victimless crime of seeking an altered state.

There are some authoritarian types, I know, who reading this will say: “And serve them bloody right!” It was a similar warped mentality that, at the height of Prohibition, led the US government to poison the nation’s supply of industrial alcohol (used to make moonshine) with a contaminant called Formula No 5. As Christopher Snowdon notes in his book The Art of Suppression, this resulted in as many as 10,000 needless deaths.

If the thing we fear most about our children and drugs is that they might get hurt, then clearly the approach we should take is the one that best minimises that risk. Prohibition evidently isn’t the answer – any more than it was for booze in Twenties America.

But even the most laissez-faire parents among us will surely agree that we do not want our kids growing up in a world where, as Noel Gallagher once put it, taking drugs is as normal as “getting up and having a cup of tea in the morning”. So where exactly should the balance lie?

Former Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner (and London mayoral candidate) Brian Paddick believes the answer lies in better education rather than more draconian policing. Perhaps this is to be expected of a man who campaigned for Mayor under the slogan “The Police Are Wasted On Cannabis” (“It went down very well with young people,” he recalls) and who once conducted a (not-altogether successful) experiment by which cannabis was effectively decriminalised in his part of south London. But his position is essentially one of pragmatism.

First, Paddick points out, there is very little appetite among the police for a drugs clampdown because “the more you concentrate on the drug problem, the more arrests you get, so the worse the problem looks – and that’s not what politicians want”. Second, he argues that when authority figures such as doctors or policemen try to lecture children on the harmfulness of drugs, they have no credibility. “What we need is people they can relate to explaining why drugs are a loser’s game.”

His view is echoed by Professor David Nutt. “One has to understand that our children are a lot smarter than politicians. What we need is to tell them the truth, not a lot of lies about how deadly drugs are.”

Nutt believes there has been a distinct softening in policy since 2009, when he was sacked as the-then Labour government’s drugs adviser by Home Secretary Alan Johnson. Partly, that’s because of the “cost implications” – the police simply don’t have the resources to pursue misdemeanours such as possession of cannabis. And partly, he believes, the public is more enlightened and better informed.

“The discussion about drugs is so much more mature than it was five years ago,” he says. “Back then, it was considered pretty radical even to talk about cannabis legalisation. Today what I said about Ecstasy being safer than alcohol no longer sounds so extreme.”

Schools appear to be changing their position, too. I recently attended an evening for worried parents of prospective teenagers, organised by my son’s school. Here we learned from a visiting Eton housemaster that the school has abandoned its former “zero tolerance” policy, where drug use resulted in immediate expulsion.

This policy, he explained, had made his ability to give proper pastoral care much easier. Where before, if he suspected a boy of drug use, he knew it could only end unhappily with expulsion, now there is an opportunity for boys to earn a second chance (by agreeing to sign a pledge and submit to regular drugs testing).

If this is the direction in which schools are heading, then I’m glad. While I think it’s wantonly cruel for an adolescent’s school career to be curtailed for the crime of trying to satisfy his youthful curiosity, I believe equally strongly that schools should send out a very clear message that drugs (much more than alcohol) are verboten.

Luckily – unless you count sniffing dry cleaning fluid – I was never exposed to drugs when I was at school. But had I been, I’ve little doubt that it would have been the ruination of my academic career – especially if the grass available then had been as strong as the skunk consumed by teenagers is now. Just how dangerous it can be I’ve seen at first hand with my stepson Jim.

Jim is, happily, well over it now, but a few years ago he went through a phase where he was smoking skunk not just occasionally (that much we knew) – but morning, noon and night – and making himself exceedingly unhappy as a result. He couldn’t sleep; he couldn’t concentrate; he experienced anxiety, guilt and depression. And he racked up some pretty high drug debts in the process.

But the reason the situation resolved itself, I’m sure, is because our family policy has always been to be as open as possible, so that Jim eventually felt able to fess up. Like many parents, I’d much rather my kids experimented with their vices under my roof (where I can be there for them if things go wrong) than in the homes of strangers.

This, I believe, is the most important thing to remember when framing our drugs policy. We need to set aside all our cantish prejudices, all our stentorian convictions about what it is our children should or shouldn’t do and simply ask ourselves the only question that really matters: how can we get them through this mess as safely, healthily and happily as possible?